This is a talklet with more questions than answers. One aspect of ‘Future Cities’ research is to consider the deployment of thousands (or more) sensors to collect real-time information from the urban environment. One aspiration we have is to build a general-purpose sensor board suitable for use in our experiments. We can set context explaining the starting objective of sensors costing £10 with a battery life of 10 years and a data transmission range of 10km.

Questions include: what does real-time mean in this context, how would a researcher interact with the board, if the board included actual sensors what would they be (e.g. temperature, humidity, gps) and how would additional sensors connect? Should we bother?